Many years ago, I wrote one of my favorite American Thinker articles, in which I addressed the Left’s endless obsession with sexuality, especially sexuality in young children and teenagers. You’ll pardon me if I quote myself a little bit here:

Those of us who came of age before the 1980s, when the Judeo-Christian, Western tradition, though battered, was still ascendant, view our sexuality as a private matter. We believe that our bodies are our own property, which means that we should not be touched or controlled sexually without our consent. A person raised with this worldview inevitably believes as well that his ability to control his body is the essence of his individuality. This physical individuality is the antithesis of slavery, which represents a person’s ultimate lack of control over his body.

Statist regimes, of course, cannot tolerate self-ownership, which is the natural enemy of government control over the individual.

[snip]

What’s interesting is that, because the Left expresses itself in terms of “freeing” people’s sexuality, many people miss the fact that it is every bit as sexually controlling in its own way as Islam is. This control comes about because the Left works assiduously to decouple sex from a person’s own sense of bodily privacy and, by extension, self-ownership. If a person has no sense of autonomy, that person is a ready-made cog for the statist machinery.

The practical problem for the Left when it tries to attack individuality as expressed through sexuality is the fact that a person’s sense of an inviolate physical self develops quite early, during childhood

Once a child individuates, he becomes aware of being his own self. … The most basic thing one can own is one’s own self, and not letting others touch that self in ways you don’t like is an exercise in self-ownership. (Emphasis mine.)

The Left, therefore, needs to decouple self and body as early as possible in a person’s development — and it does this by bringing its own peculiar notions of sexuality into the realms of child-rearing and education.

[snip]

While the overheated Marxist rhetoric of the 1960s has died away, the Leftist preoccupation with childhood sexuality, and its relentless desire to have the state control a child’s sexual development — and, by extension, to deny the child self-ownership — is still alive and well.

[snip]

While the gay agenda, which is cloaked in civil rights language that makes it hard to challenge, is the leading edge of the state’s desire to control children’s sexuality, Leftists also use the schools to manipulate heterosexual behaviors so as to destroy a child’s physical boundaries. In England, parents were aghast to learn that a school was requiring its first-grade pupils to massage each other. In Iowa (Iowa!), one middle school has abandoned any pretense of traditional morality and, instead, is teaching its eighth-graders “how to perform female exams and to put a condom on a 3-D, anatomically correct male sex organ.” The body is a tool, and nothing more.

[snip]

Freud was right when he speculated that sex, perhaps because it is the least easily satisfied human need, may also be the most powerful physical need driving human beings. Freud, however, viewed sexuality through the spectrum of a given individual’s desires. What the statists understand — and have always understood — is that our bodies are the first line in the battle between statism and individualism. If a person is allowed to develop a sense that his body is his own to control, he will never willingly yield to the demands of the state. Only by convincing its citizens that they have no personal autonomy, beginning with control over their own bodies, can a state completely subsume the individual to the bureaucracy.

I wrote those words seven years ago. I think they have withstood the test of time. The sexual insanity of the Obama years, not to mention the genitally-obsessed Women’s Marches last month, bear out my contention that, to exert ultimate control over citizens, Leftists need to start with women’s bodies.